Caster status update

Let’s see a bit about Caster navigation state:

2015-09-13 caster

Whats right:

  • Unit interaction (avoiding each other, pushing out, etc)
  • Basic pathfinding
  • Unpassable terrain outlines generation
  • Avoiding unwalkable outlines
  • Fixed a few bugs in Recast code rewritten for Caster
  • A lot of debug render display

Whats left:

  • Resolving cases where 2 units go for the same spot
  • Resolving other common cases of units getting locked or stuck
  • Returning units from unwalkable to walkable areas if they get pushed out
  • Pathfinding adaptation for Caster
  • and more ..

Once these issues are dealt with, Caster needs some testing in real-life scenarios in KP and then, hopefully, Alpha 4 will come out 🙂

Posted in Sidenotes | 2 Comments

New Caster Navigation looks promising

Reimplementing the algorithm with critical thinking over every procedure seems to be working well. Agents already avoid and push each other out of the way. And the best part – I know why they do so now.

A little sneak peak into the internals:

2015-09-03 caster

On the picture rightmost agent was staying idle and 2 agents from the left are on their course to walk to the purple dot. Each agent samples a square area in front of him (1024 points, for better debug display). Red shows where agent should not go (due to being off-way or on a course to collide with another agent). Green is preferred. White dot is the best way agent chose to go.

Posted in How things work, Sidenotes | 1 Comment

Heads up on progress

RecastNavigation port did not work out as well as I expected. Area costs do not always work, agents get stuck, paths are sub-optimal. Now working on writing my own Caster Navigation (see the anagram 😉 ) following Recast steps with a grain of salt.

 

Posted in News, Sidenotes | Leave a comment

Alpha 3.02 – 3.08

Just a small fog of war update. Trying to fix the units/houses/minimap missing on a small group of players.

Update: Alpha 3.07+ should be ending the fog of war issues now.

Knights Province Alpha 3.08
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Posted in Downloads, Sidenotes | 17 Comments

Alpha 3. Wagons!

Alpha 3 is here and it has something new!

There are many ideas for the Knights Province that revolve around the checkpoints (CP) on the map. Perhaps I should explain what CPs are first. CPs are points on the map that could be used by the player to his advantage. For example a stash of resources, or a neutral house or a trading post. A distant mountain with a gold deposit is also a CP. All these are using the same mechanic – something that player would like to take advantage of and something that is outside of players base.

One of the problems with CPs is need to transport wares to/from them. And now we are enclosing the Alpha 3 special feature – wagons! Wagons are required for almost any CP activity. Be it loot, transport, exchange, etc.

To start from something (note, any details can change in the future) wagons can not be built, look schematic, can take on board up to 10 of some ware and transport it without roads to a destination point.

There is still a lot rigging to do to make the wagons fit into the game. For now there can be spawned up from the map script, filled in only with wood and cannot be unloaded except by thedynamic script. Alpha 3 includes the test map with that functionality employed, called “Alpha Wagon”.

As usual there is a bunch of bugfixes and smaller improvements:

  • Range-check error when woodcutter is going to cut a tree near the maps edge
  • Replays and savegames do not load
  • AI would crash on attempt to train soldiers
  • Wares production time for many houses is zero
  • Add option to toggle unit icons overlays
  • Game crashes when unit tries to walk out from the occupied Tavern
  • Scrolling by key AND cursor causes a crash

And a download link:

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Posted in Downloads, News | 8 Comments

Alpha 2.01 in works

List of upcoming bugfixes:

  • Made FOW updates to game logic more frequent
  • Range-check error when woodcutter is going to cut a tree near the maps edge
  • Replays and savegames do not load
  • AI would crash on attempt to train soldiers
  • Wares production time for many houses is zero
  • Add option to toggle unit icons overlays (see on the F11 panel)
  • Game crashes when unit tries to walk out from the occupied Tavern
Posted in Live progress | 2 Comments

Alpha 2 featuring smooth fog of war

The main feature of this release is smooth real-time fog of war (FOW). Unlike previous version, this FOW is computed on GPU and is updated every frame, syncing back to the games logic every now and then. You can clearly see its benefits in smooth revelation circles, which are looking especially smooth in motion. Screenshot can show only a fraction of it:

2015-08-11 smooth fow

Since this new FOW is a brand new feature I’m especially interested in bugreports and feedback about it.

Knights Province Alpha 2

 

Posted in Downloads, News | 6 Comments

Yet another Alpha 1 update

Alpha 1 receives yet another update. The biggest change (apart from many bugfixes) is temp display of unit types icons:

2307

Once again larger portion of changes is dedicated to bugfixes. Here’s the list:
+ Units are not visible along right/bottom map edges
+ In the map editor u can’t rename the map, u can write new letters but you can’t delete letters
+ MapEdit: Player Settings -> Reveal Fog -> Reveal All option does not store state or does not read the state
+ MapEdit: Village planning -> AI Defence options -> AI defence position crashed the game
+ MapEdit: Player Settings -> Reveal Fog -> Reveal a portion of the map causes game crash (ERangeError)
+ Empty list of savegames in game
+ Unit selection breaks up after linking one group to another
– MapEdit: Extra -> View Pass-ability slider crashes game (could not reproduce)

Download: Knights Province Alpha 1.06

Posted in Downloads, Live progress, News | 23 Comments

Temp solution for missing unit models

While there are no proper unit models, temp solution is to overlay the unit icons and assest they carry (or armed with):

2015-08-05 temp unit icons 2 2015-08-05 temp unit icons

Posted in Ideas | 3 Comments

Alpha 1 update

Thank you everyone for sending in crashreports and contacting me on Skype/Facebook/other media. Knights Province is coming along nicely. There are many bugfixes, but so far none of them are blockers AND hard to fix at the same time 🙂

r2281

Current bugfixes for the Alpha 1.05 are:
+ Game freezes after AI builds a School
+ Crash when units eat last food in the Tavern
+ Crashreports would not include savegames
+ Severely updated XML handling to fix the dense fog bug
+ Crash on exit due to Resolutions = nil
+ House UI wont show up after house is built
+ Leather icon was missing
+ Game would not report sufficiently low OpenGL version on start
+ few more minor ones

And the most important update. Now the game includes the music track written specially for it by Andre Sklenar!

Download: Knights Province Alpha 1.06

Posted in Downloads, News | 8 Comments